To summarise, they delivered impressive growth by increasing ad revenues, not users.

Other takeaways from the call:

“Twitter is live” was one of the leading quotes from Jack Dorsey. He sees the real strength of the platform being the speed of the service versus other social networks.

Jack also discussed the need for an agile management team and touched on the recent changes to the senior management. He faced further questioning on this later in the call as investors are keen to know how stable the leadership team is.

Investors asked if the company would start sharing engagement metrics as a measure of improved quality of interaction despite the flat user base. They also called out how tweets down versus last year on the Superbowl.

The Leadership team was at pains to point out the long-term strategy for the business and this is anchored around five key themes (are they using OKRs?) which I’d summarise as usability improvements (what Jack called “broken windows”), focus on live streaming video, speed of communication (“twitter is live”), the safety of the platform, and investing in developers.